


Vandal Aria

by Enda



Series: Florae [4]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angst, Bittersweet, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-30
Updated: 2020-12-30
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:14:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28438227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Enda/pseuds/Enda
Summary: Long ago, Solas had asked her a question, in that brighter, simpler time, as they lay wine-drunk in bed. Would she would still want to close the Breach if it meant her whole world would be destroyed? Everything would become the Hissing Wastes, barren and bleak. The very people she had saved would slowly die of starvation. Those who survived would come to hate her. She had replied that she didn’t know what she would do.Now she knows why he asked that question, and why his eyes were wet with unshed tears afterwards.That was three years ago. Now she is marked with scars, plagued by nightmares, with a stump of an arm that aches every time it rains. And she finally has an answer.(A slightly altered version of Trespasser, where the Inquisitor gets in a couple good verbal punches we weren't allowed in the game. And of course, a bittersweet epilogue.)
Relationships: Female Lavellan/Solas
Series: Florae [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2080824
Comments: 6
Kudos: 17





	Vandal Aria

Halani races through the meadow, past the eerie statues of petrified Qunari. She hears voices in the distance, the harsh shout of the Viddasala, and someone else—that voice… 

She ascends the steps to the Eluvian, just in time to see the Viddasala grabbing her spear—and turn to stone.

And he turns around.

“Solas.”

The pelt of a wolf is slung across his shoulder, and his golden armor gleams in the setting sun. Halani opens her mouth to speak, but the mark flares, burning up her hand and arm. She cries out, falling to her knees. 

Solas walks towards her, and his eyes glow with a strange blue light. As suddenly as it started, the pain stops. Halani stands, her hands unconsciously going to the daggers at her back. But she drops them at the look on his face—he is not here to fight. 

“That should give us more time,” Solas says, softly. “I suspect you have questions.”

She stares at him, at his face, so terribly familiar after all these years. Those grey, watchful eyes. The cleft of his chin, and the subtle freckles spanning the bridge of his nose. But his clothes are no longer tattered, his feet no longer bare. He stands before her in the magnificent raiment of an ancient warrior, as if he stepped from one of the mosaics she saw today.

In the three years since he left, Halani has come up with countless questions for the moment she saw him again. But she’s never thought of the one that now rises to her lips.

“ _Who are you_?”

Solas smiles, a sad, small smile. “You always did ask the right questions. Who do you think I am?”

The images from the mosaics swim through her mind, their whispered words she felt rather than heard. The Viddasala’s revelation about an agent of Fen’Harel. The wolf pelt on his shoulder—the necklace he wore, so long ago, which she now finally places as a wolf’s jawbone. And the secret that always lay between them, so that every time he kissed her he drew away with a look of regret.

“You’re Fen’Harel,” Halani breathes, only realizing it as she says it.

She wants him to deny it.

But he only looks at her with that sad smile on his face.

“I was Solas first. Fen’Harel came later. An insult I took as a badge of pride. The Dread Wolf inspired hope in my friends and fear in my enemies. Not unlike Inquisitor, I suppose.”

Halani scans his face for any sign of a lie. But Solas had never quite lied to her, she now realizes. Only evaded and omitted.

“And now you know,” he says. “What is the old Dalish curse? May the Dread Wolf take you?”

She can’t be imagining the sorrow in his voice. If he is sorry, she is glad. “And so he did,” she says, and is gratified when he flinches.

“Ir abelas, vhenan.”

_Vhenan._ The word he had called her so many times, as they walked beneath the trees gathering herbs, as he lay next to her in bed and told her stories of the Fade. How could he use it now, after what he’s done?

“Tel’abelas,” Halani says, her voice hard. “Just give me the truth.”

Solas leads her to the edge of the cliff. In the distance, there is a castle that makes Skyhold look like a child’s toy, gilded with sunlight. “I sought to set my people free from slavery to would-be gods. They called me Fen’Harel, and when they finally went too far, I formed the Veil and banished them forever. Thus I freed the elven people and, in so doing, destroyed their world.”

Halani remembers the mosaics she saw today, the stories that complicated the simple myths of her childhood. Perhaps a year ago, she would not have believed him. But now she stands in an enchanted land beyond time, after following the Qunari through a maze of ancient mirrors—and she believes. The man she had loved is an ancient elven god, and he had created the Veil.

Over the past three years, she has built a careful wall between who she is as a woman and who she is as Inquisitor. So she places this information on one side of the wall, and asks the question the Inquisitor would want to know. “What does this have to do with your agents in the Inquisition? Why have you led me here?”

Solas turns to her, and she cannot read the look on his face. He walks past her, back towards the Eluvian that glows with a silver, unearthly light, and she follows him.

“I lay in dark, in dreaming sleep, while countless wars and ages passed,” he says, in the lilt of a poem. The cadence is so familiar it makes her throat ache. “I woke still weak a year before I joined you. My people fell for what I did to strike the Evanuris down, but still some hope remains for restoration.”

He turns to face her, and that familiar look of sorrow is back. “I will tear down the Veil and save the elven people, even if it means this world must die.”

Halani, the Inquisitor, asks: “How?”

“A good question, but not one I will answer. You have always shown a thoughtfulness I respected. It would be too easy to tell you too much. I am not Corypheus. I take no joy in this. But the return of my people means the end of yours.”

She remembers when she had first met him, how she made the mistake of saying _our people,_ and Solas was quick to correct her. So this is what he had meant. She didn’t know how much it would hurt, to know the truth.

And so she is Halani, the woman, when she says: “I always knew you had a secret. But I never guessed it was this. Why didn’t you tell me?” She cannot keep the pain from her voice.

“I knew you would never agree with my goals. As much as I wanted to tell you, it would be unforgivable—because it would force you to choose. You love this world. I’ve seen you rebuild it, brick by brick. How could I make you choose between it, and me?”

“So you reserved the right to leave me, but didn’t give me the same chance.”

Halani stares at him, daring him to break her gaze—and he finally does. 

“I suppose… I suppose you are right. Enal’sal, ir abelasel. But as selfish as I was for loving you…” Solas looks back up at her, and she hates how her heart hurts at the pain in his eyes. “If I set aside my duty because of that love, I would be even more selfish. I can’t make a second mistake to justify the first.”

“So I was a mistake.”

“It was a mistake to let you think I could love you in the way you deserve.”

She bites back a retort. She can’t argue with that. “But isn’t tearing down the Veil the same? A second mistake to justify the first?”

At that, he looks away, and she’s fiercely gratified her dagger found flesh.

“I understand the comparison,” he says, his voice soft, as he regards the mountains in the distance. “But it is not the same.”

Before Halani can reply, the mark flares, and she falls to her knees at the pain of it.

“It will eventually kill you. Drawing you here gave me the chance to save you… at least for now.”

She looks up at him, and through the haze of pain and grief, part of her still marvels that he is in front of her, more real than any of her countless dreams of reunion. She has wondered for so many years if she still loves him, and now, she finally has her answer.

“Solas, var lath vir suledin,” she says, and doesn’t know if it is a statement or a plea.

“I wish it could, vhenan.”

And he kneels down and kisses her—oh gods, just the same as he used to—and then he pulls away, just the same as he used to. She wants to say something, anything, to make him stay.

But she has tried so many times before, and it has never worked.

So Halani says nothing as she watches him leave her for the hundredth time. He steps through the mirror, and the glass seals shut behind him.

She feels something cold on her face, and brings her hand up to feel it.

His tears, still wet on her cheek.

* * *

Long ago, Solas had asked her a question, in that brighter, simpler time, as they lay wine-drunk in bed. Would she would still want to close the Breach if it meant her whole world would be destroyed? Everything would become the Hissing Wastes, barren and bleak. The very people she had saved would slowly die of starvation. Those who survived would come to hate her. She had replied that she didn’t know what she would do.

In the morning, she awoke to him gone, and a single blossom of vandal aria beside her on the bed.

Now she knows why he asked that question, and why his eyes were wet with unshed tears afterwards.

That was three years ago. Now she is marked with scars, plagued by nightmares, with a stump of an arm that aches every time it rains. And she finally has an answer.

She would tell him:

Vandal aria grows all across Thedas, but the kind that grows in the Hissing Wastes is special. The harshness of the environment forces it to adapt. The variety found there is the only one of its kind that can be distilled into a potion to cure blindness. Harsh environments force new gifts into existence.

So what, then, if we lose the rolling fields of the Hinterlands, the pristine snow-capped mountains of Skyhold, the rolling sea? The miracle of survival is that we adapt. The canyons and desert would become rich with meaning, as rich as the variation between forest and sea. The Dalish have sixteen names for rain and the shemlen only one. The things you are forced to live with grow larger in your mind, and that is the beginning of appreciation. How could you not stare at a desert for a year without eventually coming to love it? We are resilient creatures, we are hardy seeds. Wherever we can survive becomes our home.

But I know you are restless, vhenan, and so am I. You long for magic, which is another word for being awed by beauty. Perhaps there’s some farther horizon, some longer journey, to the edge of the desert and beyond. Who’s to say there’s not a new world, better than the one you lost, if we try hard enough to look for it?

The terrible and beautiful thing about the past, my dear heart, is that we can never reclaim it, no matter how hard we search for it in dreams. It is only a reflection on a pond, which our touch is forever warping into something else. That is what makes the future mysterious—as mysterious as magic—and worth waiting around to get to know. 

—But Halani knows him, and she knows what he would say. She knows why his mistake with the Veil is different from his mistake with her.

Solas would always choose the path that hurt him most, simply because he thought he deserved it.

Halani knows him too well to truly believe she can save him. His self-loathing runs too deep. He will try to hurt her, to attack what she most holds dear, to force her to see him as he sees himself: a monster. And maybe she will indeed come to hate him.

But for as long as she can, she will love him. She will try to show him he does not need to fulfill his own prophecy.

_There’s a better world out there, vhenan._

You deserve to live in it.

**Author's Note:**

> Some of this character insight is borrowed from a similar character in the Baru Cormorant series by Seth Dickinson. Highly recommend if you’re into tragic romances. (which clearly, if you’re here, you are, ha)
> 
> “Var lath vir suledin.” According to Reddit, this means “Our love will endure.”
> 
> “Enal’sal, ir abelasel.” A guess at “Once again, I am so very sorry.” Cobbled together based on the wonderful Project Elvhen.


End file.
